Long-term objectives are to improve institutional treatment practices in public mental hospitals, intramural units of mental health centers, and community extended care facilities. A prerequisite for meaningful treatment evaluation in the latter settings is reliable and valid assessment of patient characteristics and behavior and of staff characteristics and treatment procedures. Similarly, a prerequisite for placing day-to-day clinical work on an applied-science basis is objective assessment for identification of patient problems and progress and for describing, monitoring, and training institutional staff in their treatment interactions with patients. In the course of a long-term comparative study of the treatment of chronic mental patients, two observational assessment instruments were developed which possessed exceptional reliability and validity within the original units and populations. These instruments offer exceptional promise of providing objective data for day-to-day clinical work, staff training and monitoring, while simultaneously providing higher level scores for use in evaluation research. The present application requests support for the concurrent collection of full week samples of observational data, along with standardized instruments for assessment of staff, patient, and ward activities, characteristics, and behavior over open-closed, chronic-acute placements and defined treatments programs in selected hospitals, mental health centers, and extended facilities. Descriptive and normative data on all instruments will then be established for future research and clinical work, while extensive reliability and validity analyses will be conducted on the new observational instruments on the same staff-patient populations. Target extended-care facilities for the latter data will be selected so as to obtain a second years follow-up on patients placed from the earlier comparative study. Generalizability studies will be conducted to determine parametric characteristics of observers and instruments through analyses of the latter data, data existing from the earlier comparative study and from special video-tape sequences of staff and patients established for this purpose. Self-contained training materials, consisting of manuals and video-taped sequences with scored protocols, will be developed and comparatively tested for effectiveness in observer training to insure diffusion and adoption of findings in practical clinical work and future research.